Rice Defends Stand On Iraq's Nuclear Aims

October 04, 2004|By The Baltimore Sun

WASHINGTON — The national security adviser said the White House couldn't afford to underestimate Saddam.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sunday defended the emphatic statements she made in the run-up to the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program, as a news report said prominent officials had voiced doubts much earlier about the evidence behind her claims.

Rice acknowledged she knew in 2002 of a "dispute" among intelligence officials about a central piece of evidence she and other senior Bush administration officials were using to justify the war -- that Saddam was trying to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

But she said the administration did not want to underestimate the threat Saddam posed, so it took the evidence seriously.

"A policymaker cannot afford to be wrong on the short side, underestimating the ability of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein" to build a nuclear program, Rice said on ABC's "This Week."

Rice was responding to a report Sunday in The New York Times, based on anonymous sources, that the government's pre-eminent nuclear experts at the Energy Department had said as early as 2001 that they did not believe the aluminum tubes were part of a nuclear program, but for small artillery rockets.

Vice President Dick Cheney said in a September 2002 speech the United States had "irrefutable evidence" that the tubes were for Iraqi uranium centrifuges.

That same week, Rice told CNN in an interview that the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear-weapons programs," adding a now-famous phrase: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Rice said Sunday that she knew at the time "there was a dispute" within the intelligence community about the tubes, but that she "actually didn't really know the nature of the dispute."

She based her statements on the overall assessment by the intelligence community, backed by then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, that "these were likely, and certainly suitable for, and likely for (Saddam's) nuclear-weapons program," Rice said.

"I stand by the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein and remove this threat to the Middle East, this thorn in the side of any effort to build a different kind of Middle East," Rice said.

Senior advisers to Democratic presidential challenger Sen. John F. Kerry seized on the New York Times report Sunday as proof Bush misled the nation and Congress to pursue the war in Iraq.

The Kerry campaign appeared hopeful the Times report would help blunt the effect of new charges by Bush that the Democrat wants to give foreign countries a veto over pre-emptive military action to defend the United States. *